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Three years have passed since Jonathan Stroud conjured up the last instalment in his diabolically good Bartimaeus Sequence, but our wait for another ripping yarn is soon to end. I was a latecomer to Stroud’s fiction – it wasn’t until the publication of the final novel in the Bartimaeus Sequence that I stumbled across it…

Is there anything to say about the Mad Max Trilogy that hasn’t already been said in the thirty four years since audiences first thrilled to the deep rumble and furious roar of the last of the V8 Interceptors? Now there was a sound to strike fear into the hearts of the feral punks reaving their way…

As Lt. Col. James Rhodes might say (privately at least), Iron Man 3 rox. The first cab off the rank since Joss Whedon’s The Avengers, Iron Man 3 is a worthy addition to the Marvel stable. There’s no surprise that it fails to measure up to the ensemble magnificence of The Avengers – and really,…

In November last year the BBC quietly announced plans to adapt Susanna Clarke’s multi-award winning novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, as a mini-series of 6 hour long episodes. The BBC broke the news so quietly in fact that we missed the announcement of what could well be a television highlight of 2014. Never mind,…

Kibble. A word coined by the late great Philip K. Dick to describe those useless objects which proliferate in our lives and threaten to overwhelm us over time. Kibble proliferates, it replicates, it accumulates, contributing little of value to our existence. I can think of no better word to describe the vast majority of novels…

Brian J. Robb’s Steampunk: An Illustrated History of Fantastical Fiction, Fanciful Film and Other Victorian Visions is described by its publisher, Voyager Press, as “the definitive book on the writers, film-makers, artisans and aesthetes who created the extraordinary genre”. It’s a bold claim to make of a work about a literary sub-genre and cultural movement…

Few novels in recent months have crossed my desk for review and been snatched up with as much enthusiasm as Clockwork Angels, a collaboration between legendary Canadian rock band Rush and prolific SF author Kevin J. Anderson. While novelisation’s of rock albums are few and far between – giving this project a certain fascination right off…

There’s no question that James Cameron’s contribution to modern SF cinema has been considerable. Quite where he stands in the ranks of significant SF writer/directors is debatable, but to my mind he’s up there with Ridley Scott. As with Scott, Cameron hasn’t written and directed a great number of SF movies, but what he has…

How much unrestrained enthusiasm can a reviewer get away with before being dismissed as an uncritical fan, I wonder. I might just be about to find out. For the second time this year I’m struggling to rein in my enthusiasm and keep check of the superlatives I feel the need to toss about with wild…

Almost three years of silence have followed the announcement that Sam Raimi was attached to direct a big screen adaptation of Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. Typically a silence of this magnitude indicates that a project has bitten the dust or found its way into development hell, but reading between the lines of Raimi’s recent announcement…